Two friends of friends are visiting Ireland from Australia and they’ve been staying with me for a couple of days. We spent Sunday together and I brought them for a visit to the Organic Centre in North Leitrim. Three reasons: – 1) It’s a great place. Against all the odds, the Organic Centre was started over twenty years ago by a few people who had a love of nature and a desire to pass on their knowledge and belief in organic gardening/living. 2) The Grass Roots Cafe there serves yummy wholesome homegrown vegetarian lunches, and 3) because to get from my place to there we travel through beautiful mountain scenery with many inspiring views along the way.
Of course it being Leitrim and mountain land, we pass through a lot of forestry.
The Glangevlin road on the way to the Organic Centre in North Leitrim
So inevitably the subject of forestry came up (no, I didn’t bring it up, they did if you must know!) The first question they asked was “What’s happened here?” (see photo below)
What's happened here? - asked my Australian visitors.
I asked them what they thought it was and they replied it looked like some sort of waste land. Of course it was a clearfell site, – an area of land where a conifer plantation was planted about forty years ago and the entire thing has been cut down again for the timber. It is a common sight throughout north and south Leitrim and along the border with Cavan, where I live.
Driving over the mountain through Glangevlin you can see the whole cycle of plant, grow on, and fell, sort of like a slow maturing agricultural crop. Usually the plantations on the mountain are not thinned. The gate is closed for forty years and then re-opened when the ‘crop’ is ‘ready’ for clearfelling.
Reaforestation after clearfell with the next 'crop' of trees peeping over the horizon
It’s not so much that I am against this approach to forestry, although it does nothing to interest or inspire me. It’s one way, and it seems to work for a lot of people/companies. It’s just that, having seen so many stunningly beautiful commercial forests in other countries that I’ve visited with Pro Silva, I hunger to see something similar happening here in Ireland. And I’m painfully aware that we import virtually all of our hardwood timbers. I long to be amongst foresters who see and understand forests in a more holistic way and who practice it in their daily forest management as a matter of course. It’s exciting to be among like minded people learning something of such immense value. Now that does capture my interest.
Multi-dimensional, commercial close to nature spruce and beech forest in Slovenia
So now I don’t have long to wait for another such excursion. Tomorrow, along with others from Pro Silva Ireland, I fly out to Holland for a look at some real good forests. We will visit a 10,000 h/a estate managed by Pro Silva foresters. We’ll visit forests in Apeldoorn that combine timber production, recreation and nature management. And we’ll visit a forest in the polder (reclaimed land) that produces hardwood timber, including hurley ash which is sold to the Irish market. I’m really looking forward to this trip and to sharing about it on localforestlog when I return.
So if you’re getting sick of seeing yet more photos of clearfell sites on this blog, – the reason is that’s what surrounds me in my area, and this is a local forest blog. But hang in there. Next week you’ll be seeing some delectable photos of real forests from our trip to Holland. I’ll do my best to present all I learn and some of the highlights on the next post.
Jan Alexander with ten year old alder at the Cabin Woods and 14 year old Ben in the background 
Related posts:
- RDS/Forest Service Irish Forestry Awards 2009
- A Change of View (Part two)
- The Beauty of Rosebay Willowherb
- Visit to Holland – “Het Loo” Royal Estate and Badger Mountain
- A Change of View (Part one)
Tags: Clearfell sites, Holland
